Into the BLAME! (WIP Name)- session 1

As far as campaign names go, Into the Blame! is probably about as bad as they get. I put this game together in the span of an hour before the game, though I had the general concept floating in my head for awhile.

I used Into the Odd on a whim, having never played it before.The setting is basically just Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME! manga, but adapted ever so slightly to OSR gaming.  Players will have to navigate a post-post-apocalyptic cyberpunk urban hellscape where earth is but a legend and the sky has never been seen, because everyone is trapped in an endless metal megastructure. The world is the dungeon. 

Of course, Into the Odd is more steampunk weirdness and isn't quite a perfect mix with what I was trying to do, but that's ok, because I started it out with the characters waking up in the middle of the dungeon with no idea what was going on, having been abducted from Bastionland.

The Party

• Kryle, the Rocket Man (level 1)
• Lailah, the one with the Mule (level 1) 
• A Mule, the beast of burden (level 1 follower)

Awakening
 So the two characters, Lailah and Kryle, both woke up on an uncomfortable bed, wearing nothing. They had been cryogenically frozen. Thankfully, they quickly found a closet of generic uniforms similar to that worn by the Vault-dwellers of Fallout, as well as a few things they owned. Lailah owned a Mule, which also had it's own cold sleep bed. Kryle owned a rocket, no rocket launcher included. The player was absolutely thrilled at this chargen result. 

Leaving the Bay of the Sleepers, the characters stepped through an automatically opening door into the next room. The walls were made of featureless white plastic, and the room was mostly unadorned, it would have been quite boring if not for the corpse in the middle of it, wearing a generic uniform, being eaten by a robotic wolf. The canine immediately ran down a hallway to the west, and the duo paused only to check the corpse for gear- they found a knife. As both had started with pistols, the melee weapon was a reasonable find, and Kryle kept it. They followed the dog cautiously as it ran around the corner, checking doors in the hallway as they went. 

In one room they encountered a man, just standing there with his back to them. Lailah shot him in the back of the head, an action that Kryle did not appreciate, at least until the man turned around, revealing that his skin was melting off a half-cyborg head. At this point both Lailah AND Kryle unloaded into the man,  and he went down. It wasn't until they had searched his corpse that they realized he had not actually done anything hostile, but shrugged this off. 

Following around the corner, Lailah used an Arcanum she had started with- the Heart Locket- to find the location of the wolf, which had disappeared. While Kryle was dragging the mule around the corner, Lailah entered the door the wolf was hiding behind, and found three of it's friends. They jumped her and dragged her to the ground, but she made her pistol explode, destroying one... and killing herself in the process.

Kryle rode the mule into the group of four wolves, intending to suicide with his rocket, jumping down onto the ground with the rocket. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bit of a dud, not having nearly the destructive potential it should have had (only 5 damage on that delicious d12), and Kryle avoided taking lethal injuries from the blast. The robots avoided destruction as well, but they retreated from combat, to the south. 

The Life and Death of a "Wall"
While investigating the lair of the wolves (finding a few cred-sticks, the currency of this world), Kryle was joined by another woman, who burst out from a wall. She didn't explain herself,  but said that "she had already had a very long day". They moved south, where the wolves had fled- only to hear the sound of bullets tearing into metal. Glancing around the corner of the hallway, they saw a turret, smoke rising from the machine gun attached to it, and the destroyed remains of three robot wolves. The new arrival, known only as "Wall", tossed a grenade at the turret, blowing it up. They discovered that the turret had been guarding a nice cache of explosives and gear, including body armor that was similar to SWAT gear, and another rocket(!).

Beyond this guard station, they found a heavy duty shut door that would not open. They considered using the mule to deliver all their explosives and destroy the door, but found a side passage, which contained odd tubes with chairs in them. The tubes led out of the room, into a dark tunnel. After much deliberation, Wall sat in one of the chairs, and with a zooming noise, she was gone. Kryle panicked, and waited for her return. She did not. 

Wall had entered a network of fast transport tubes that zipped over a vast cavern. Unfortunately, they were very badly maintained, and had a giant hole in them. The chair flew out of the tube, and Wall was not dexterous enough to grab onto anything before becoming a stain upon the ground. 

Like this, but with a chair, and more ruined, and more bodies at the bottom of it.

Lunchroom
Kryle eventually returned the way he came, all the way back to the room where they had first encountered the robot dog. He went south this time, and found himself in a room with plastic tables and three machines along the wall. Here he was met by yet another cold-sleeper who had awoken, with the name of Jai. They examined the machines, and found one was a vending machine- it only had a few items left, and demanded obscene amounts of credits for the purchases. The new arrival remembered her handy dandy bolt-cutters, and broke open the machine, getting several medical syringes filled with healing serum, a few grenades, and a can of lemonade (perfect for bribing security guards!). 

They moved onto the next machine, which, long story short, was essentially an ATM. They broke into this machine as well, and coins came falling out, more coins than they could ever carry.

The final machine was built into the wall, and materialized food, Star Trek style. Unfortunately, the food was rotten. 

Kryle searched for something adhesive, and actually found it! On the underside of one of the tables, was another healing syringe duct taped to the table. He used this tape to attach coins to a grenade, creating a poor man's fragmentation grenade. 

Jai and Kryle proceeded south, and found two paths. One led to a room flooded with a silvery liquid on the floor (the players could not resist labeling this room as, uh, "jizz".) They did not touch it. The other path led to a small spiral staircase, that led downwards, into the lower floor(s?) of the facility. What would they find there? What secrets would they discover? How many more characters would the player known as "N" burn through? Find out next time, should this game continue beyond session 1!

Kryle by the end of the session, equipped with machine gun and body armor. Not sure of the source, the player found it, not me.

Casualties:
Lailah, level 1, death by robot dogs
Wall, level 1, death by falling out of a fast transport tube

Commentary:
This worked out very remarkably well, given how little time I had to prepare it. There was a distinct lack of random encounters thanks to me forgetting that bit of prep, but the session was still eventful... and lethal. One of my players is very happy to treat characters as game pieces to be used recklessly and discarded easily. The robot wolves were foreshadowed hard and the players had no excuse. The death via transportation tube was a result of a critical failure on a save- if it weren't for that, she would have just taken some damage from a fall. We both agreed this was how it should turn out.

I allowed the players to destroy a turret without even rolling damage. I felt the grenade was the perfect solution to the problem. Because of this, they were able to get a very nice set of loot early. The actual loot was a bit of a mess - I don't have a full set of items for this world yet, so there was lots of healing syringes, grenades, and credsticks.

The mule survived to the end of the session, and that makes me happy. It is the single most out of place element, all thanks to Into the Odd random starting item tables!


As a system, Into the Odd was simple. A little too simple. Despite having a higher page count than Knave, it ended up being even more simple in practice- three saves + hp, limited starting inventory, and that's pretty much it. The starting kits are a lot of fun, lots of flavor to the starting items, but otherwise there's very little fuel to be used for key details about the characters themselves, unlike Knave. There's no backgrounds, no classes, and no real statistical different besides HP and saves.

See, with no attack rolls being made, character's attributes no longer inform their effectiveness at melee vs ranged damage. Higher will characters are better at using arcanum in unconventional ways, but that's the only difference as far as spells are concerned. The game, then, is not only classless, it's also practically statless, at least when it comes to determing who is better than other people at tasks. Knave is classless but still has some texture when it comes to attributes- some characters lean in certain directions.This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean characters are very samey, even on a mechanical level.

I'm all for building characters via play, and Kryle in particular became a fairly interesting guy, due to his love of rockets and trauma from witnessing two deaths. But overall, I can see why Chris McDowall is working on the sequel to Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland, which has evocative backgrounds as a core feature. That should at least give players something to grab onto.



I will likely continue using Into the Odd for the next session as they explore the abandoned Cryosleep Facility, but intend to eventually develop my own system, probably based on either B/X or Knave, that will allow for characters native to this world, instead of Bastionland rejects that somehow woke up here. A central theme of the system will be cybernetic augmentation and biological mutation. Fun times ahead!